Market Signal vs. Market Value: Why CEO Capability Often Goes Unrecognised (And How to Fix It)
By Karan Kashyap · Founder, Stay Noisey
Most CEOs and founders of growth-stage businesses face a problem they don't realise exists until it costs them. Their actual capability and track record far exceeds what the external market believes about them. They've built real businesses, led teams through difficult periods, and created measurable outcomes. But when opportunities arise outside their current company, recruiting top talent, raising capital, forming partnerships, or positioning for exit, the market doesn't price them according to their true value.
This gap exists because of information asymmetry. The work you do inside your business isn't visible to the wider market. Without visible proof of your capability, the market fills in the blanks with assumptions, often to your disadvantage.
Understanding Information Asymmetry in Founder Markets
Information asymmetry occurs when one party in a transaction has more or better information than the other. In founder and CEO markets, you know what you've built and what it required. Your board knows. Your team knows. But investors, potential hires, advisors, partners, and acquirers do not. They make decisions based on observable signals: reputation, visibility, associations, social proof, and a trail of evidence they can verify quickly.
When that trail doesn't exist, the market doesn't pause to investigate whether you might be exceptional. It moves on. Decision-makers operate under time pressure. They scan, compare, filter, and reduce risk based on what they can see immediately.
This explains why two founders building similar companies can be perceived very differently and the difference often isn't capability, it's legibility. One founder's value is easy for the market to read and verify while the other's is not.
The economic foundations for this dynamic were established in the 1970s by Nobel Prize-winning economists George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz. Akerlof's seminal 1970 paper "The Market for Lemons" demonstrated how information asymmetry can cause markets to collapse or contract into adverse selection of low-quality products [1]. His analysis showed that when buyers cannot distinguish between high and low-quality goods, they adjust their willingness to pay downward, which drives high-quality sellers out of the market.
How Signal Loss Accumulates Over Time
Signal loss happens when your true value and your market value drift apart. You continue building and operating, but fewer people outside your immediate circle can accurately assess what you're doing or what you're capable of.
Signal loss manifests in specific, high-stakes ways:
Recruiting challenges. Top talent doesn't understand what you're building quickly enough. They require more explanation and persuasion than you expect so the best candidates pass because they can't easily verify your credibility or vision. Research shows that candidates increasingly vet potential employers by examining the digital presence of the leadership team. Executives who showcase transparency, vision, and engagement positively influence perceptions of company culture and attract higher-quality applicants.
Partnership friction. Potential partners need excessive context. Every conversation starts from zero. You spend time explaining fundamentals that should be understood before the first meeting.
Investor and advisor access. You're not top-of-mind when opportunities arise. You're not being pulled into the right rooms or invited into conversations where reputations and relationships form.
Market transitions. When your situation changes, a funding environment shifts, a board decision happens, a restructure occurs, an exit opportunity appears, you discover that your credibility lives only inside your company. You've built no stored trust in the wider market.
This last point is where signal loss becomes most costly. The moment you need the market to recognise your value, you're starting from zero.
Source: Blackwood Row
The Football Market Analogy: Talent vs. Perceived Talent
Football markets make this dynamic visible because valuations are public. A player's market value isn't determined solely by their ability. It's shaped by the market's perception of their ability.
Two players with similar talent can have vastly different valuations. The market prices the player who has performed in high-visibility environments, who influential voices discuss, whose story the market understands. A player can be outstanding in training, but if they don't get minutes in visible matches, the market cannot price them like a proven performer. The absence of visible proof becomes a permanent discount.
This isn't fair, but it is predictable and consistent.
Founder and CEO markets operate identically. Your skill is real. Your track record is real. But your market value is determined by what can be seen, repeated, and verified by people who don't sit in your executive meetings or board rooms.
Why Many CEOs Resist Building Market Signal
Many CEOs resist creating external visibility because they associate it with ego or performance. They don't want to be loud. They don't want to "play the game." They don't want to become what they perceive as a "LinkedIn influencer."
This resistance contains a strategic error. Visibility isn't the same as noise. Visibility is the ability for the right people to understand you without requiring a warm introduction or extensive explanation.
For founders and CEOs, external visibility isn't vanity. It's risk management. When your environment changes, you don't want to start building market credibility from zero. You want stored trust that precedes you.
LinkedIn functions as a distribution layer for professional signal. With over 1 billion members globally, it has become the primary platform where investors, potential hires, partners, and advisors form beliefs about what you do, how you think, what you value, and whether you're credible. Research indicates that executives who publish monthly content receive three times more profile views and connection requests than those who only share updates [2]. This increased visibility translates directly into recruiting attention and career opportunities.
If you don't participate, you leave a vacuum. Vacuums get filled with assumptions, and those assumptions are rarely in your favour.
Building Legible Market Signal Without Becoming Performative
The solution isn't posting more content or becoming more active on social platforms. It's making your value legible in a way that aligns with how you actually operate and think.
When I work with clients, the focus is on creating signal that does three things: shows how you developed your standards and judgement, provides specific proof of what you've built and navigated, and demonstrates that you see patterns in your market that others miss.
This isn't arbitrary. These elements work because they're difficult to fake. Anyone can claim expertise, but specific, verifiable examples of decisions made under constraint are expensive to fabricate. Nuanced observations about market dynamics are impossible to simulate without real experience.
The challenge is that most CEOs treat this as a content problem. They think, "I should post on LinkedIn." That's tactical, not structural. What you need is a method that extracts what already exists in your head, turns it into reusable assets, and distributes it consistently without requiring you to become a professional content creator.
This is infrastructure work, not campaign work. You build it systematically. It doesn't expire when a funding round closes or a product launches. It compounds over time. The market updates its view of you based on repeated exposure to your thinking, your track record, and your perspective.
One post doesn't create signal. A consistent systematic approach does.
The Market Signal Test: Can Someone Price You Correctly?
If an investor, advisor, senior hire, potential partner, or acquirer discovered you today through professional networks or search, could they quickly determine:
What you're building and why it matters
What you believe and how you think about your market
What you've done that proves you can execute under pressure
What kinds of problems you solve as a leader
Why you're credible beyond your current title or company name
If the answer is no, the market cannot price you accurately. It will default to surface-level signals: your title, your company name, perhaps a press mention or two. That's rarely the full picture of your actual value.
The Market Will Decide With or Without Your Input
The market will form a view of you whether you actively shape it or not. Sometimes that view will be fair. Often it won't be. But it will always be based on what the market can observe. If you want your value reflected accurately, you need to make it legible. Not louder. but clearer. The goal isn't attention or reach, the goal is accurate recognition so that when opportunity appears, you're already understood. When the market needs to make a decision about you, it has the information it needs to price you correctly.
Your capability is real. Your track record is real.
The question is, does the market know that?
References
[1] Akerlof, G. A. (1970). The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3), 488-500. Nobel Prize-winning paper establishing the foundational concept of information asymmetry in markets. Demonstrates how quality uncertainty can cause market failure when buyers cannot distinguish between high and low-quality goods.
[2] Bradsby Group. (2026). LinkedIn for Executives: Recruiting Firm Insider Tips. Available at: https://www.bradsbygroup.com/2026/02/17/linkedin-optimization-executives-basic-profile/ Research-based analysis citing LinkedIn's Creator Report showing executives who publish monthly content receive three times more profile views and connection requests, directly correlating to recruiting opportunities.